METROPOLE FILM BOARD
ABOUT
​Metropole Film Board, Inc. is a not-for-profit corporation that serves as a fiscal agent for special projects by Storyville Films and other documentary production companies.
Alberta Jacoby
Irving Jacoby
John Ferno
Richard Leacock
Shirley Clarke
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Originally established by Alberta & Irving Jacoby, in 1950, as the Mental Health Film Board, their partnership developed and produced documentary films about psychiatry (The Lonely Night), child development (Angry Boy), social work (The Neglected), aging (The Steps of Age), and race (Hitch).
Over four decades, the Film Board produced over a hundred ground-breaking films on these subjects, working with pioneer American documentary filmmakers including Williard Van Dyke: The City (1939); John Ferno: The Spanish Earth (1937); Shirley Clarke: Skyscraper (1960); Richard Leacock: Crisis (1963); and Irving Jacoby: The Photographer (1948). A number of their films are available in the permanent film collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York.
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​In 1996, the film board was renamed Metropole to conduct a broader program for the development and production of documentary films not likely to be funded through commercial channels.
Among the films developed and produced by Metropole are: Sister Rose’s Passion, Constantine’s Sword, and On Broadway.​​
HISTORY
FISCAL SPONSORSHIP
Metropole recently served as fiscal sponsor for such films as Rigged: The Voter Suppression Playbook, narrated by Jeffrey Wright, The Calling: A Medical School, directed Asako Gladsjo, and Josh Howard’s The Lavender Scare, on the U.S. government's witch-hunt of federal employees suspected of being homosexual.
Other films with Metropole as fiscal sponsor include: The McCarthy Project, a cinema verité portrait of Eugene McCarthy, and Libraries on Fire, about Indonesia’s “Living National Treasures”.